Students love freestyling on topics like love, jealousy, and truth, so when I discovered The Wall Street Journal’s The Soapbox column, I knew I had landed upon a great mentor text for personal writing.
Category: Allison Marchetti
In Search of a More Meaningful, Effective, Enduring Way to Teach Grammar
My whole teaching life I have been in search of a way to teach grammar that is meaningful, effective, and enduring. I have tried bits and pieces of other people’s curricula for years––Kelly Gallagher’s Sentence of the Week, Nancie Atwell’s editing sheets and proofreading lists––but I’ve never been able to find my groove with these […]
Supporting Our Most Reluctant-to-Share Writers
We’ve all wondered what more we could do to help the Todd Andersons of our class–the painfully shy writers who would rather do a week’s worth of extra homework than read one line from their writer’s notebook aloud. And while leaving the shy student alone and allowing him to skip his turn in the […]
Happy New Year from Moving Writers!
2015 was a momentous year for us at Moving Writers: we published a book with Heinemann, and collected over 52,000 views on our blog! This is all thanks to you, dear readers, for your support, your questions, and your continued interest and enthusiasm in our work. As a thank you, we are reposting our top […]
What Do You Do in the Last Days of a Writing Study?
As a writing study dwindles to an end, it can be hard to know what to do in those last few days — what minilessons your students want, whether to plan for more conferring time, how to address the range of needs at the end. Students are working toward a common deadline, but this can […]
Don’t Miss a Beat: Writing Workshop with a Substitute
As flu season progresses, it’s likely you’ll be out at least once over the next few months. Leaving plans for a substitute can be stressful and time-consuming. I used to feel like I had to abandon workshop for that day because it was too complicated to explain to a sub. But with a little advance […]
What Happens at NCTE Doesn’t Stay at NCTE
This weekend Rebekah and I travelled to Minneapolis for the NCTE Annual Convention. For the past 96 hours we have been immersed in the world of language arts, and while we’re exhausted and our backpacks are overstuffed, our brains and hearts are full and we just can’t shut up about NCTE. We can’t stop processing […]
The Power of Reading Work Out Loud: A Culminating Project for Poetry Study
A few weeks ago, I blogged about different ways writers can share and publish their work in the classroom. In today’s post, I zoom in on one of those options: creating an audio recording of a piece of writing. “Here, try it,” I said, nudging the fluency phone towards Cameron, a 9th grade writer. “I […]
Teaching Grammar a Few Craft Moves at a Time
As teachers, we’re always thinking of ways to make grammar less scary for students. Most students would say that grammar is a set of rules, so we have to work hard to undo this restrictive thinking and help them see grammar as a series of possibilities rather than limitations. Recently I have said to my […]
Writing Workshop Workflow: A System for Tracking Student Progress in Workshop
In the last three years I have moved from a paper system to an almost exclusively digital system in writing workshop. Finding a good rhythm in a digital environment requires just as much thought as in a paper environment. After a lot of experimentation, I think I’ve landed on a workflow that satisfies my student […]
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